The Well of the World’s End
The novelist Elizabeth Garner on the symbolic importance of water when she was growing up in rural Cheshire
In a place called Blackden, in the garden of my childhood, there is a deep well. It sits in the corner of a spare square of land, held between two old halls: brick-fronted Toad Hall; the timber-framed Old Medicine House. They are connected by a corridor of glass. It is a place of memory, stories, stones and stars.
When I was a child, that square was wild grass. When the wind was high it would whip round in a vortex, like an echo of the well’s depths cast above, stirring the grass into a circle. My brother and I would chase the run of the weather, clockwise and widdershins. But we knew better than to ever stand on the wooden plinth of the well lid, no matter how wild our games.
Alongside play, it was also a place of practical ritual. The well was our only water source and it needed to be watched. My father would test it every autumn, dipping a marked pole into the depths and recording the measurement on the family calendar. In the summer months that same stick would dictate the allowed inches of water in the bathtub. My mother would then run a hose out of the bathroom window syphoning into the vegetable patch. The water was always returned to the land.
Alongside the playfulness and the practicality there was something else. Wells are liminal places which echo our natures back to ourselves and provoke transformation. I was raised within a world and library of folklore. At the heart of it was the Joseph Jacobs collections.
There was the Well of the World’s End, where the banished girl was sent by her Stepmother with the instruction to bring water home in a sieve. At the well-side she made a bargain with a frog, who revealed the trick of it: “Stop it with moss and daub it with clay, and then it will carry the water away.” In return for this, the girl was bound to a promise: to do whatever the frog commanded for one night. So it was that she opened her door to him, lifted him onto her knee, fed him supper, took him to her bed and then was given her final instruction,
“Chop off my head, my hinny, my heart,
Chop off my head my own darling;
Remember the promise you made to me,
Down by the cold well so weary.”
She followed his command. The enchantment was broken; the frog-prince returned to his true human form and they were wed. Even at that early age, I understood the truth in this, versus the more palatable retelling: a sacrifice demands more courage than a kiss.
One the rare occasions when frogs did emerge from the depths, I kept my distance. When the wind that ran through the grass caught in the belly of the well stone and echoed upwards, I did not draw closer to hear the song.
By October 2002, I had left home and was living in London, starting to explore how I might find my own voice and the tales I needed to tell. My tiny slice of back garden bordered the edge of a canal. We were often visited by ducks, swans, and the occasional heron who stood watch at the gates of the lock. I always kept a weather eye on the water.
I first heard about the transformation of the Blackden well in a phone call from my mother. They had been having a busy and exciting week in the labyrinth. I had to see it to understand it.
A dear family friend, Peter Plummer, left a gift to my parents in his will. They wished to use it to create a memorial in his memory. They returned to the well.
I first saw it at Christmas that same year. The wooden well lid had been replaced by wire mesh which allowed a cross-hatched glimpse of the brick-lined belly of the well and dark water below. The grass was gone. In its place a labyrinth had been set, sunken into the earth in concentric circles of brick and tiles. The space in between was set with cobbles, some of which stand proud above others. As my father told me ‘The cobbles were a path round Toad Hall, which we replaced with flags for safety. They would have been collected from the surrounding land, having been deposited there when the ice retreated about 10/11,000 years ago.’ Repurposed at the wellside, they were placed with pattern and with purpose.
My mother tells the tale of the construction in her own words ‘The labyrinth is a metaphor and a puzzle; a representation of a folkloric journey to find wisdom at the well. The cobbles that stand above the rest represent the constellation of Orion. As soon as you commit yourself to walking the labyrinth you pass between two cobbles and you enter Orion. To walk the labyrinth, you must not cross the three lines of tiles in the paths. The diagonal path marks the line of shadow cast by the corner post at Sunset on the Spring and Autum Equinox. This is reflected in the colour of the pebbles: light on the side of the diagonal that gets the most sun and dark on the side that gets the least. Once a young boy ran round the paths and looked into the well for wisdom. “All I can see is myself,” he said. “If that isn’t wisdom, I don’t know what is.’
Memory, stories, stones and stars echo around the well at Blackden. In winter nights, Orion the Hunter rises over the gable end of The Old Medicine House and sees himself reflected in the moonlit stones formed by the ancient ice flow. In summer days, the water pumped from the well runs across the cobbles, chattering. The circles of the labyrinth shine. Behind this, I can still hear me and my brother laughing as we chase the wind.
Elizabeth Garner is the author of two novels, Nightdancing and The Ingenious Edgar Jones, both of which were influenced by traditional folk tale narratives and motifs. In 2022 she published Lost & Found, her own retelling of a selection of traditional stories.
She is a freelance fiction editor, teaches creative writing and is the events organiser at Caper Bookshop in Oxford. She is also the arts trustee at The Blackden Trust, an educational charity established at her family home in Cheshire